1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of portals and portlets and more particularly to the maintenance of screen and form state in portlets.
2. Description of the Related Art
Distributing content about large computer communications networks is not without its challenges. In particular, the quantity of content available for distribution in a computer communications network often varies proportionally to the size of the computer communications network. At the extreme, the Internet hosts a vast quantity of content not easily accessible by most end-users. Portals represent a sensible solution to the problem of aggregating content through a channel paradigm in a single, network-addressable location. In consequence, portals have become the rage in content distribution.
Portlets are the visible active components included as part of portal pages. Similar to the graphical windows paradigm of windowing operating systems, each portlet in a portal occupies a portion of the portal page through which the portlet can display associated content from a portlet channel. Portlets are known to include both simple applications such as an electronic mail client, and also more complex applications such as forecasting output from a customer relationship management system. The prototypical portlet can be implemented as server-side scripts executed through a portal server.
From the end-user perspective, a portlet is a content channel or application to which the end-user can subscribe. By comparison, from the perspective of the content provider, a portlet is a means through which content can be distributed in a personalized manner to a subscribing end-user. Finally, from the point of view of the portal, a portlet merely is a component which can be rendered within the portal page. In any case, by providing one or more individually selectable and configurable portlets in a portal, portal providers can distribute content and applications through a unified interface in a personalized manner according to the preferences of the end-user.
Portal servers are computer programs which facilitate the distribution of portal based Web sites on the public Internet or a private intranet. Importantly, it will be recognized by one of ordinary skill in the art that the signature characteristic of all conventional portal servers can include the aggregation of content from several portlet applications within a single distributable page in a uniform manner. To that end, each portlet application within the portal page can be represented by a portlet user interface distributed by the portal server to requesting client computing devices.
For the interactive portlet applications, a two-way portlet user interface can be provided. In the two-way user interface of the portlet application, user input can be forwarded to the portal server through the use of a submit action in which the user input can be posted or otherwise provided to the portal server. Subsequently, the portal server can forward the user input to the appropriate portlet application in which the user input can be processed by the application portlet. In this way, the portal can be viewed as a logical extension to the Web application in which the Web application has been formalized in terms of user and application interface. Some have postulated that the portal merely represents the next generation of the Web application.
With the enhanced functionality of the portal comes a price of complexity in managing multiple application states, both in the portal, and at the client computing device. This complexity has led to a limitation given current content browsing technology for use in the conventional client computing device. More particularly, when a user initiates a submit action in connection with a portlet user interface in the portal page, the input data in the portlet user interface can be returned to the portlet application running in the portal server. Yet, where data had been provided within multiple portlet user interfaces in the portal page, all but the data provided in the portlet user interface associated with the running portlet application will be lost.
Notably, some portlets periodically auto-initiate a submit event at regular intervals to trigger the portal server's refreshing of the latest state of the portlet application. The periodic auto-initiation of a submit event in a portlet user interface can magnify the problem of lost portlet data because at the time of submit, the portlet requesting the refresh may not necessarily have focus in the portal page. Moreover, the auto-initiation of a submit event in one portlet user interface may arise concurrently with the manual initiation of a submit event in another portlet user interface in the portal page. As the conventional content browser only can post the form data associated with the first occurring submit, the subsequent manually initiated submit will fail to forward the data portlet user interface data to the portal server for processing.